There is never a question of what to paint but only how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image's end-product.
–Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman described his art as an attempt to "paint the paint." His work operated on what he believed is painting's ability to be about its own activity, and in this way painting was, for Ryman, a meditation on itself.
We have been trained to see painting as 'pictures' with storytelling connotations, abstract or literal, in a space usually limited and enclosed by a frame which isolates the image. It has been shown that there are possibilities other than this manner of 'seeing' painting.
–Robert Ryman